The present invention relates generally to compression of still image and moving video data, and more particularly to the application of calculation of statistics of the behavior of the quantized transform representation of the video from the measured variances and the measured correlations in pixel space. Once the statistical behavior of the video is modeled, the video streams can be collected into successive refinement streams (progressive mode), and the probabilities of the constructed symbols can be calculated for the purposes of entropy removal. The measured variances and correlations suffice to reconstruct the compressed video streams for any frame or group of frames.